Kill Yelsin, who's saying? Zhirinovsky, Le Pen - Archives Of Pain

JEAN-MARIE LE PEN
(born 1928). French political leader. Early in his career, the French right-wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen may have seemed too xenophobic and extremist to develop a large following among the French people. A rise in unemployment and increasing immigration from North Africa, however, brought about great changes in the attitudes of the French electorate. Le Pen moved from the far right toward the center without changing anything about his political views.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was born on June 20, 1928, in La Trinite-sur-Mer, a coastal village in Brittany, to a fisherman and his wife. He studied at a Jesuit boarding school, called Saint-Francois-Xavier, in Vannes but was expelled at age 16. As a law student at the University of Paris in the late 1940s Le Pen led a right-wing student group. One of their goals was to prevent Communists from taking over the Left Bank.

In 1954 he joined a paratroop regiment serving in the Foreign Legion in Indochina, and upon his return he began following the speeches of Pierre Poujade. Poujade criticized the French tax system and defended French artisans. Le Pen began making impassioned speeches and was elected to the National Assembly; from 1956 to 1962 he was its youngest member. Le Pen had a reputation for a bad temper, and he lost an eye in a brawl in Paris in 1958. In 1972 he founded the National Front. Four years later, the multimillionaire Hubert Lambert left Le Pen an estate valued at 4 million dollars. Le Pen moved into Lambert's mansion and used the proceeds from the estate to finance his political campaigns.

After Francois Mitterrand was elected president in 1981, Le Pen found himself gaining wider acceptance among the French. In 1986 the National Front won 35 seats in the National Assembly with 9.7 percent of the vote. A 1987 interview in which Le Pen referred to the Nazi gas chambers as "a detail of history" led to a lawsuit brought by survivors of the Holocaust. He was found guilty but fined only one franc. He appealed the ruling, and in 1991 the appeals court in Versailles upheld the verdict and increased the fine to 900,000 francs. He continued to insist that he was not anti-Semitic and that he would appeal the ruling again.

His popularity was evident in the 1995 presidential elections, when Le Pen garnered more than 4.5 million votes, 15 percent of the votes cast. He did not win, but the party made significant inroads in cities across France. Encouraging his compatriots to consider immigrants the cause of increased crime and unemployment in the country worked for the National Front.

There were many in France who found Le Pen's extreme views distasteful. In 1996 the French cabinet backed a plan to increase penalties for racist statements after Le Pen said that he believed racial inequality was obvious. Even his one-time mentor Pierre Poujade denounced Le Pen, saying he was opportunistic. Le Pen was the author of 'Les Francais d'abord' (The French First, 1984) and 'La France est de retour' (France Is Back, 1985).